Ares speedrun - in verification!

I know you guys have hijacked this subforum for Xsera, but there doesn't seem to be a more appropriate one. And the rest are practically dead, except for Trash Talk.

I've been working on a speedrun of Ares and I was wondering if anyone here still plays. It's mostly for fun but I may submit it to speeddemosarchive.com. If I do, they'll need people who've played to verify it.

In the mean time, I have a few questions I hope you can answer:

- How fast does the game run in "fast time"? Is it a fixed ratio or does it run as fast as possible? I'm using the game timer, so this doesn't affect my results, but I'm curious.

- Why do the zoom in and zoom out keys sometimes stop working? It's mostly a problem on Chapter 16: Hornet's Nest. After I've transferred control to a Heavy Destroyer I can only change the zoom using the shortcuts for a specific zoom level.

Edit: Solved. It's a keyboard hardware limitation.

- Has anyone else tried this? If so, do you want to compare times?

This post has been edited by NMS : 12 June 2011 - 07:26 PM

Please post the results of your speedrun, it could be helpful to use Xsera developers. (and sorry for posting this off-topic-ness in your topic, it sounds extremely interesting)

Back on topic, I do know that some commands are disabled in some levels (I'm thinking of the tutorials, mainly, although I don't know if that's true for any of the regular levels). Hopefully that addresses your second bullet.

Here are my best recorded times so far:
1 - 0:35
2 - 0:21
3 - 1:30
4 - 5:19
5 - 1:51
6 - 2:06
7 - 0:41
8 - 1:00
9 - 4:42
10 - 0:16
11 - 2:16
12 - 7:07
13 - 2:03
14 - 9:25
15 - 1:39
16 - 1:39
17 - 7:37
18 - 2:52
19 - 5:06
20 - 6:33

Chapter 20 needs serious work, but the rest I think are pretty close to optimal.

The movies are in DV format, so they're enormous, but I'll look into encoding them in some other format to make uploading easier.

As for the zoom keys not working, I can't replicate it anymore, so I guess it was just some weird bug.

Nice.

Kudos for you.

Interesting.
Let us know when you post the movies.

F6 is the speed mode. I call it speed because it forces Ares to draw one frame for every clock calculation that the computer can handle. So if you have a really fast computer, this could potentially speed things up from 30 FPS (frames of reference, as a time measure) to 300 to 400 FPS, speeding things up by a factor of 10 or more. On old Quadras and Performas, this was probably around 40 to 50 FPS on the less busy levels.

Thanks for the info. I though it seemed faster than I remembered. I'm playing on a 1 GHz eMac, which is twice as fast as the computer I used to play on. I estimate fast mode is 20-something times as fast as normal.

Also, chapter 20 is down to 4:00! It's totally ridiculous.

Videos are up on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=B569D1DCEA1423FE

I'd bet you can improve a lot on your Shoplifter 1 time. I always had better luck in that mission by transferring control to the Obish transport and instructing the HVC to follow me. In your run, you tell the transport to hold back to keep it out of harm's way, but when you control it directly, you can bring it in immediately.

These videos will be very helpful, thanks for posting them!

downloads speedrun videos

Sweet.

subscribes

QUOTE (adam_0 @ May 19 2009, 11:22 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

These videos will be very helpful, thanks for posting them!

You're welcome.

QUOTE (Pallas Athene @ May 19 2009, 12:26 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'd bet you can improve a lot on your Shoplifter 1 time. I always had better luck in that mission by transferring control to the Obish transport and instructing the HVC to follow me. In your run, you tell the transport to hold back to keep it out of harm's way, but when you control it directly, you can bring it in immediately.

Well, I have to control the cruiser for combat. No way will it kill everything that needs to be killed fast enough under AI control. But I transfer control to the transport to pick up and drop off the Obiards. If I wait too long, the transport may get scared of the cell and evade, but I don't think that happened in this attempt. I certainly didn't hold it back. I don't want to destroy the cell too soon, though, because the Obiards will end up scattered. So the plan is to damage but not destroy the cell, watch the transport approach on radar, and transfer to it when it gets close. Then the cruiser destroys the cell, the Obiards move towards the transport, and I can drift in backwards, grab 3-5 of them, and head back to the liner. I screwed up the third cell (I didn't have time to target the transport, so I didn't transfer), but I think it only cost a few seconds. The first 2 cells went pretty well. I'll try to improve it though.

QUOTE (adam_0 @ May 19 2009, 10:22 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

These videos will be very helpful, thanks for posting them!

downloads speedrun videos

yeah, seriously.

they're a fantastic reference. A video of every level from start to finish. excellent.

BTW, what did you use to make the recordings, NMS? An old version of Snapz?

This post has been edited by redsteven : 25 May 2009 - 02:18 AM

Just bear in mind that I don't play some of the levels the way they're meant to be played. You'd get a better idea of how they work looking at them in Hera.

I record it by connecting the external monitor port and audio out on my eMac to a Hollywood DV Bridge, which converts the analog signal to DV and sends it via firewire to a MacBook, where I import it into iMovie. For YouTube, I converted the clips to H.264 and deinterlaced them using MPEG Streamclip. It's kind of surprising they're even watchable on YouTube, considering what they've been through.

Well, I figured out why the keypad + and - keys don't always work. It's a keyboard hardware limitation. They don't do anything while certain combinations of other keys are held down. For instance, command and space together (which I would normally be holding down while I'm fighting in a heavy destroyer).

Chapters 6, 16, and 18 do not play in high quality. Other than that, great job!

Cool, watching them now!
(Gets urge to warm up os9 and take Ares out for a spin!)

I submitted my run to speeddemosarchive.com and they need verifiers to watch the videos and confirm that I'm not cheating. I would really appreciate it if some people who know the game would sign up. For more information, go here: http://speeddemosarchive.com/forum/index.p...pic,1285.0.html

Don't post that you signed up (this is to keep me from influencing the verifiers). Thanks!

Let's hypothetically say that I might be interested in looking into verifying this speed run. I went to that site, but I found no way to view all the videos (except what you posted on YouTube, which I don't think is official). Do I need to ask the admin for the location of the videos, or how do I watch them, outside of your YouTube videos (or is that how it should be done)?

Sorry, I should have explained you have to PM Mike Uyama (mikwuyma) to sign up to verify. There is a link on the left of the post. Once there are verifiers signed up, he will ask me to send him my videos.